


so many signs (no compasses)

by liadan14



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Anal Sex, Hair Washing, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Oral Sex, Redeemed Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Redemption, Threesome - M/M/M, love language: reheated chicken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:22:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25596481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liadan14/pseuds/liadan14
Summary: Booker had imagined his penance very differently. He’d been planning seventy or so solid years getting drunk in Paris, wallowing in his own guilt – nothing new there, he’d been doing that for two hundred years already – and then taking the final thirty to get his shit together enough to be…something, when he met the others again. Less detestable, maybe.Quynh had put paid to that notion, and he’d been hungover, unshaven and miserable when he’d seen them again.Unfairly, Joe has shaved since Booker had last seen him. To throw people off their trail, to keep anyone from recognizing him, to keep Merrick’s people from recognizing him, and Booker swallows that down miserably with the rest of his shame. The torment of Joe looking like that, younger and sharper and more furious with Booker than ever, is nothing Booker doesn’t deserve.Nicky still hasn’t even spoken to him.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 73
Kudos: 932





	so many signs (no compasses)

Booker had imagined his penance very differently. He’d been planning seventy or so solid years getting drunk in Paris, wallowing in his own guilt – nothing new there, he’d been doing that for two hundred years already – and then taking the final thirty to get his shit together enough to be…something, when he met the others again. Less detestable, maybe. 

Quynh had put paid to that notion, and he’d been hungover, unshaven and miserable when he’d seen them again.

Unfairly, Joe has shaved since Booker had last seen him. To throw people off their trail, to keep anyone from recognizing him, to keep Merrick’s people from recognizing him, and Booker swallows that down miserably with the rest of his shame. The torment of Joe looking like that, younger and sharper and more furious with Booker than ever, is nothing Booker doesn’t deserve.

Nicky still hasn’t even spoken to him.

He’s perched awkwardly on a stool in the corner, where he feels the most out of the way. Andy and Quynh are gone, vanished the second they caught each other’s eye, trying and failing to kill each other, or possibly just to touch each other, but with too much death between them, they’d forgotten any other way other than with fists and swords. Nile had followed as Andy’s human shield.

Nicky and Joe seem unconcerned.

They’re murmuring to each other the way they do, sometimes, that mishmash of Nicky’s Genovese and Yusuf’s North-African Arabic dialect incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t around at least eight hundred or so years ago. The empty pit that used to be where Booker kept his emotions used to fill with rage at the injustice of it all, that these two should have an eternity together and he should just watch them have it when he—when he—

It doesn’t matter. Booker forfeited the right to have feelings about it one way or another.

He wonders if he should make a break for it out the side door, go back to his exile.

“Don’t even think about it,” Joe warns in his abominably perfect French when he catches the drift of Booker’s eyes.

“Did you stay behind to guard me?” Booker asks.

Neither of them answer.

“I’m not planning on hurting you,” he says, frustrated. “I’ve done too much of that already. Just let me leave, it’s Andy you should worry about.”

Nicky and Joe exchange a look that speaks volumes, a look even Booker can read as saying, _worry about Andy, what a dumb idea_. “Leave and go where?” Joe asks. His tone is mild, like it usually is before terrible things happen. “Back to your garret to pickle your liver some more?”

“You’ve been keeping tabs?” Booker asks. He expected no less – made no effort to cover his tracks from them, even, on the off-chance they needed him. On the off-chance they wanted him.

Joe’s hand is warm when he clasps it over the back of Booker’s neck, a solid comfort he’s given a thousand times. “You’re still one of us,” he says. “And you look like shit.”

Booker starts to laugh, but his throat is too tight, and it mangles into a sob on the way out.

“Let’s get some food into you,” Joe says. His tone is inscrutable, his gaze even, and Booker is at sea. “When’s the last time you ate, Basti?”

Booker shrugs the weight of the old name off his shoulders (Prussia, 1848. Booker’s German was much better than either Joe’s or Nicky’s, but Joe had delighted in the pet names. Nicholas had become Nicky, Sebastien had become Basti, and they had both been _meine Lieben_ , but only Nicky had been _mein Schatz_ ). “Yesterday?” He hazards. There had been peanuts at the bar.

“Nicky made Coq au Vin last night, we’ll heat it up,” Joe says, heading towards the safehouse’s kitchen. Booker feels the saliva gather in his mouth at only the thought of Nicky’s Coq au Vin, but—

“You hate reheated chicken,” he calls after Joe.

“And you hate it cold,” Nicky says. It’s the first time he’s spoken directly to Booker. “We’ll reheat half and keep the rest cold.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Booker says, even though Nicky’s right, he hates cold chicken and how slimy it feels on his tongue.

Nicky slides his fingers through Booker’s unwashed hair, pushing it out of his face. “Of course it matters,” he says. Booker’s eyes slide shut at the touch. For a moment, he lets himself imagine it’s absolution.

The phantom of their hands on his skin pulls Booker to the kitchen after them.

He lingers in the doorway, but he sits when Nicky presses at the small of his back, pushing him to a chair. The food smells heavenly.

“Thank you,” he says, and it sounds hollow and ground out even to him.

But Joe just smiles, says, “Don’t thank me yet, I made the couscous.”

Booker passed hungry into nauseous into starving hours ago, hot on the heels of Quynh’s rampage. He digs in. The couscous is fragrant – boiled in the vin of Nicki’s Coq au Vin, he can tell, rich with rosemary and cherry tomatoes, mango and chili, and every now and again the sharp, fatty burst of chorizo. He closes his eyes in bliss. “You used pork,” he says in surprise.

Joe shrugs. “I missed your cooking,” he says. “Always with the butter and pork, you got me hooked.” He had tried to explain Halal, back in the 1830s, and Booker had been horrified at the thought of never eating pork again. He’d been an idiot. Joe had been old enough to be flexible in his rules, by then, and he’d accepted pork with distaste when Booker hadn’t budged.

“It’s delicious,” Booker says with his mouth full. 

“I’m glad,” they answer in unison. They smile over at each other and a pang of longing makes its way into Booker’s empty, empty heart.

They finish the meal in silence.

Joe stretches, arms corded above his head, shirt riding up over the base of his belly. Booker’s been awake for something like fifty-six hours and he lacks the self-control to keep his eyes off the sliver of skin. “What do you say,” Joe asks Nicky. “Bathroom?”

“Bathroom,” Nicky agrees, and, leaving their dirty dishes on the table in a way Joe has never once let Booker get away with in a hundred different safehouses, they grab him by the elbows and force him to the bathroom. 

“Wh—” he tries to ask.

“Mon choupinou, I mean this kindly, but you smell like a sweaty distillery,” Joe says. “We’re going to get you clean.”

“I can clean myself up,” Booker says, insulted and embarrassed both by the name and the sentiment. “I’m an adult.”

“Eh,” Nicky says, wagging his hand to and fro to indicate he’s not convinced. His eyes are laughing. He turns the taps on the bathtub, waits for the water to heat up before he drops the plug in.

“You’re going to let me bathe in peace, at least?” Booker grumbles.

“Nope,” Joe says cheerfully. “You could climb out the window.”

“I won’t.”

“Can’t risk it. Come on, get undressed.”

Booker debates asking them to turn around, but what good would it do? They’ve seen him naked before. They’ve seen him shot dead, with brain spattered all over his clothes, with shit caked in his pants, with terror clouding his eyes. They’ve seen the worst, and they never turned away from him until he turned from them, first. He struggles out of his shirt first, inhaling two days worth of sweat and the sticky tobacco scent of the bar he’d been in before this all started. They’re probably right, he does need a bath.

He climbs in, trying not to look at either of them, and then trying not to groan in relief as hot water surrounds him. They let him luxuriate for a while, having one of those conversations they have that is all eyebrows and jerks of the head. It ends when Joe tosses Nicky something just out of Booker’s line of sight.

Nicky rests his hands gently but firmly on Booker’s shoulders. “Go underwater a moment, yes?”

As Booker ducks under, he wonders if this is it, if this is where they betray him like he did them, where Nicky’s hands become vise grips on his shoulders, keeping him down, drowning him like Quynh drowned so many times.

Nicky smiles at him when he comes up, and Booker curls in on himself in shame. Of course they wouldn’t; not them. They’re better than him and they always will be. Nicky’s renewed touch on his head startles him.

“Keep still,” Nicky says. “Or I’ll get it in your eyes.” His French is near perfect, just ever so slightly accented, and his hands are gentle through Booker’s hair, rubbing shampoo into it. Shivers run down Booker’s spine, and whether it’s Nicky’s touch, Nicky’s voice, Joe’s heavy presence on the other side of the room, his own exhaustion or everything put together, he may never know. 

Booker’s washed his hair many times in the last two hundred years. He’s never needed as long as it feels like Nicky does, rubbing at the roots, massaging his scalp until Booker’s half-unconscious, head barely above water.

“Watch out,” Nicky says, voice barely more than a whisper. “I’m going to rinse it out now.” 

Booker wonders why he’s still speaking French, why they haven’t reverted to the Italian Nicky and Joe gravitate towards, even as the spray of water thunders against his scalp, clouding the water with suds. 

“Come on, old man,” Joe says, brandishing a loofah. “Just a few more minutes.” He runs his weapon gently over Booker’s limbs, through his chest hair, and it is all Booker can do not to cry.

For at least sixteen decades, Booker has been aware he wants them to touch him just like this. 

For at least seventeen, he has known he doesn’t deserve it.

They wrap him in towels, afterwards, when Booker’s too full, too confused and too exhausted to do much of anything but stand there and drip. They’re soft – he remembers months of safehouses without dryers, where the towels had been brick-hard and scratchy. Some things, this century is good for. 

Joe holds him by the hand on the way to the bedroom, maybe to lead the way. Probably to lead the way. Booker’s still naked. He considers saying something, but the only clothes he brought reek.

The pillows are soft and the mattress squeaks. Booker hasn’t felt so comforted by a bed in months. In France, sleep had been a respite between bouts of drunkenness and a renewal of his nightmares – clean, white dreams of Nicky and Joe, gaunt and pale on hospital beds beside jars and jars of their internal organs. He will not dream of Quynh, he remembers, and that too is a comfort.

“Hurry up, habibi,” Joe’s telling Nicky in hushed tones, and Booker wonders if this is how he’ll die, this time, smothered by a pillow, shot dead into the mattress, naked and trusting. This must be how they feel around him always.

The mattress dips beside him, and Booker’s enveloped in warm arms. He blinks down to Nicky’s long, elegant fingers, sighs when the mattress dips again and Joe settles behind Nicky where he’s always belonged. 

“Sleep, Sebastien,” Nicky tells him firmly, and Booker does.

-

Booker wakes blearily to the awareness that he is naked and in bed with Joe and Nicky.

In fairness, he’s had this dream many times before. 

“Good morning,” Joe says from far behind him, reaching out to pinch at Booker’s hip.

“Uh,” Booker says.

He turns slightly onto his back. Nicky’s still mostly asleep, arm tossed over Booker’s chest, face buried in his shoulder. He’s wearing boxers, but nothing else. Joe smirks at Booker over his head. “Beautiful, isn’t he?” 

Booker blinks. 

“Although,” Joe says, with a pointed glance towards where Booker is really, definitely completely naked while both of them at least have their dicks covered, “you’re looking very well yourself, this morning.”

“Very well,” Nicky scoffs blearily, not lifting his head from Booker’s shoulder. “You called him gorgeous in 1856.” 

“I did?” Joe leans in to press a kiss to the back of Nicky’s neck.

“Mm,” Nicky affirms, pressing back into Joe’s touch. Booker misses his warmth instantly.

They look over to him as one, Nicky with low lids like a cat’s, half-asleep and wanting, Joe open and curious. “So,” Joe says.

“I’m sorry,” Booker rasps out.

“We know that,” Nicky tells him impatiently.

“I should leave,” Booker says. “I have – ninety-nine years—”

He thinks of ninety-nine years without fighting in the kitchen over whether to reheat the chicken, ninety-nine years without the clasp of Joe’s palm on the back of his neck, and his words stop.

“Sebastien,” Nicky says gently, reaches out to cup his cheek. 

Booker tries to turn away, but he can’t, arrested by Nicky’s eyes.

“We were a little hasty with those hundred years,” Joe says, voice light. “We’ve been discussing it.”

Nicky gives him a sharp look over his shoulder that Booker can’t quite read. “We should have seen how you were hurting,” he says to Booker. “I’m sorry we didn’t.”

“It’s no excuse,” Booker says thickly.

“It’s not,” Joe agrees, earning a sharp kick from Nicky. “But we miss you too much to stay angry.”

“You do?” 

When Nicky kisses him, Booker can hear nothing but buzzing in his ears, can smell nothing but the faint scent of the aftershave they’ve shared since the 1950s, can feel nothing but the soft slide of Nicky’s lips against his, can taste nothing but sleep and mangoes on Nicky’s breath.

When Nicky pulls away, Booker is floored, shocked immobile. “But—” he begins, stops, and then begins again. “You two are—you _can’t_.”

“Says who?” Joe asks. “We’ve loved you a long time. We choose how to do that.”

“You love _each other_.”

They smile at each other then, like they share a secret between them no one else will ever share, and Booker knows he’s right, knows this is the end of the line and he should have let them go on, let himself have one more taste before it ended –

“We love each other,” Joe agrees. “Love – it’s not a finite resource.”

Booker closes his eyes against his own desires. “I don’t—I can’t always be outside looking in.”

“We’re inviting you in,” Nicky tells him. His thumb rubs softly up and down Booker’s neck.

“I’ll never share what you have.”

Joe scrambles up, reaches across to rest his hand right by Nicky’s, against Booker’s shoulder. “No,” he agrees. “You won’t. And Nicky won’t watch football with me. I won’t read Voltaire for either of you. Not sharing the same things, that’s what makes us who we are. Sharing what we want, what we love in each other, that’s all we’re asking you for.”

Nicky tousles Joe’s sleep-mussed hair. He mumbles something in Genovese, just for Joe, and Joe shoots him a smile. 

“You’re sure?” Booker asks, and his voice is unfamiliar even to himself, rough with hope.

Joe kisses him in answer. As sweet as Nicky’s kiss was, Joe’s is playful, nipping at his lips, sinking in deeper only to pull away again.

“What do you say?” He asks when they pull apart. “Be with us?”

In answer, Booker sinks to his knees by the bed.

“Fucking _Catholics_ ,” Joe groans somewhere above him, and there’s a pun in that Booker would make some other time, some time when Joe’s legs haven’t swung around to let him shoulder his way between them. He’s desperate, abruptly, to touch, to prove how much he’s wanted this, to do _penance_ , a concept suddenly sweet. He presses clumsy kisses up the insides of Joe’s thighs, fingers clumsy on the cotton of his washed-out boxer shorts, pulling them out of his way until he can lave his tongue across the tip of Joe’s cock, still barely hard but growing in interest by the minute.

Joe’s hand settles at the nape of his neck and Booker groans into Joe’s skin.

“Look at him,” Nicky says in French. “Look at how much he wants you, my love.”

“I’m looking,” Joe rumbles. He twitches against Booker’s lips. 

“In São Paolo, when you swung in through the window,” Nicky continues. “He looked at you like he wanted to eat you alive. Like he’d let you do anything to him.”

In fact, at the time, Booker had been thinking of a few pretty specific things he wanted Joe to do to him, but the point was valid. He runs his tongue around and around the head of Joe’s cock, relishes the pleased sounds from above him, the wet smack of their kiss. He’s watched them kiss a million times. This is the first he doesn’t feel jealous.

“That true?” Joe teases. “Did you want me in São Paolo already?”

Booker pulls away. “In São Paolo,” he agrees. “In Sarajevo. In Berlin. What does it matter?“

He returns to the task at hand. He’s done this before, in shady bars and backrooms, in other people’s bedrooms, when his curiosity got the better of him, when his pessimism won out and he’d thought he’d known he’d never have a chance at this. He’d gotten good at it in New York, perfected his technique both at blowjobs and at aiming bricks at policemen during the Stonewall Riots. Joe and Nicky had been in Russia, then.

Joe swears in Arabic when Booker swallows him all the way down.

“He’s good, love,” he narrates to Nicky. “So good. Knows just when to go all the way, his tongue—”

“Better than me?”

“Better than _me_ ,” Joe says, and Booker swells with pride.

“Ah!” Joe exclaims, and pushes Booker off gently. “You’ve got to give me a break, habibi,” he says at Booker’s disappointed expression. “We’ve got plans for you.”

“Plans?” Booker asks, his voice rough, even as he reaches for Nicky, rushing to fill his mouth before he admits to either of them how desperately he needs them. Nicky comes willingly, hard and wet at the tip just from watching, and he tastes like Joe when Booker swallows him down.

“We were going to flip for it,” Joe says pleasantly, “but then Nicky suggested that he fuck you while I fuck him. In Sarajevo.”

It’s been a hundred years or more since Sarajevo.

Booker moans, overwhelmed, around Nicky, technique going sloppy as he throbs.

“Oh,” Nicky groans. “Now you’ve done it. You like that thought, huh, Book?”

Booker can’t even pull away to answer. He hopes his frantic sucking is enough assent.

“Love, I think—” Nicky stops as Booker tongues the head of his cock. “Yes, we’ve got to move on or we won’t be able to.”

“Told you he was good.”

Nicky pulls Booker up by his hair. “So good,” he praises, pressing kisses into Booker’s cheeks, against his lips. Booker falls against him, knees weak with it, pushing them both back against the creaky mattress. Firm hands stroke against Booker’s back even as he loses himself in Nicky’s mouth, hard against Nicky’s hip. Joe whispers endearments against his shoulder, running nails down the curve of his spine, telling him how good he is, and Booker has to bury his head in Nicky’s shoulder, overwhelmed.

“Is it too much?” Nicky asks him, even as Joe says, “I’m sorry, I know I’m too much.”

“No,” Booker says, “No, you’re just right, I just wanted for so long—”

“Let’s give you what you want, then,” Joe decides. The mattress heaves when he gets up, groans when he returns. His fingers are slick against the insides of Booker’s thighs and Booker’s tried this, too. He’d had two hundred years to wonder, after all, ever since the first time he caught them, Joe grappling at the headboard and gasping out delirious phrases as Nicky railed him into the bed in the apartment they’d all been renting back then. It still feels brand new when it’s Joe’s fingers opening him up softly, stabbing hesitantly towards the place he must be able to find blindly in Nicky.

Nicky’s hands are warm brands over both of them, his mouth a constant presence on Booker’s throat, his ears, his mouth. Booker finds himself deliriously grateful that no one expects him to fuck anyone today because he doesn’t think he could (although the thought, the thought of how Joe’s eyes would go wide and then crinkle into a smile, of how Nicky’s long legs would wrap around him, the thought’s been a constant companion). 

“C’mon,” Joe says, slapping his ass. “Turn over.”

Booker turns, and Nicky gets up, leaving his side cold and empty. But Nicky’s back in an instant, spreading his thighs wide, settling between them. “Ready?” He asks, just a hint of Joe’s twinkling smile at the corners of his mouth.

“Yes,” Booker gasps out, and then gives up on words as Nicky slides into him.

Sensation is a knife wielded by an artist, the heat of the burn giving way to the fullness of Nicky within him, of Nicky pressed tight to him, brushing up against his cock. Booker’s so long processing the feel of it he nearly doesn’t realize that Nicky’s been still for far too long.

“You can move,” he says with some effort.

“No,” Nicky says, dropping his head to rest against Booker’s collarbone. “I really can’t.”

Joe laughs behind him, a bright thing Booker wants to hear in his dreams. “One moment, love,” he says.

Nicky’s hips don’t move so much as they grind slowly against Booker’s, setting loose a low, wild noise in his throat he didn’t know was waiting there, and Nicky responds in kind to the way Booker clenches around him, involuntary. 

“Joe,” Nicky gasps out. “Joe, I’m begging you, hurry up.”

“You can’t rush art,” Joe says.

“If you get your fucking sketchbook now, so help me God—”

In the next instant, Joe’s pressing into Nicky, the weight on Booker intensifies and his hips ache with the stretch around them both.

Nicky bites into his collarbone.

Booker yells.

It takes a moment to sort out their limbs and their movements, Joe setting the pace, standing behind Nicky, who presses down into Booker, lying back on the bed. The weight is almost too much, but the rub of Nicky’s stomach against Booker’s cock, the flush of blood high in Nicky’s cheeks, the rough sounds shaken loose out of all three of them as they move, it’s so good Booker doesn’t care if his joints crack, if his thighs strain.

Nicky presses his thighs back towards his ears, and abruptly, Booker can’t take it at all. It’s _too good_ , Joe using Nicky to fuck him, just a little bit harder than before, just a little sharper over his prostate, just a little more more more. 

Joe’s hand is the one to reach around Nicky, to fumble for Booker’s cock, to trace lines of fire up his skin, to grunt out, “Show us, Sebastien, show us you love us.”

Booker’s never been obedient, but his cock doesn’t seem to know that, painting wet strips up his belly, into Nicky’s chest hair, slowing to a drip as Nicky drops down against him. “Booker,” Nicky says, and his mouth stays open, just a bit, gasping as Joe drives into him, as he drives into Booker. “Sebastien.” 

Booker reaches up him, buries his hands into Nicky’s hair, pulls him down into a kiss that feels more like he’s ravaging Nicky’s mouth. Nicky moans into his mouth, gone on pleasure Booker can barely imagine, overwhelmed already at having Nicky inside him. To take and be taken at once – to feel like this—

When Nicky comes, it’s as if he can barely contain all he’s feeling within his body, grinding forward into Booker, harsh sparks of sensation against battered nerves, pressing deep and fucking his come in and in and in. From the sound Joe makes behind him, he clenches down as well, keeping Joe tight to where he wants him, using them both for all they’re worth, and Booker would be sucked dry and scraped raw if he could make Nicky make these noises always.

Joe’s not far behind, rumbling satisfied noises against Nicky’s hair as he comes into Nicky, grinding them all into a standstill.

Untangling themselves is harder than it should be by rights, but Nicky’s limbs seem to have lost all their tension, and Booker can barely move his legs, stretched out and aching.

He’s still hard when they’ve finally pulled off.

“Not enough?” Joe asks with a wink.

“No, it’s not—” Booker starts, unsure how to say that watching the two of them come made it impossible for him to go soft, possibly ever.

“I think we still need to take care of him,” Joe says seriously to Nicky, who has sprawled out by Booker’s side and seems unlikely to move in the next few hours.

“Mm,” Nicky says, and drags Booker in for more kisses. “I’ve got this end,” he says drowsily to Joe in between slow, soft kisses that threaten to make Booker’s heart beat right out of his chest.

“Well,” Joe says. “Seems I owe you one anyway.” He winks as he drops to his knees, and to Booker’s shame, he lasts all of a minute and a half with Joe’s tongue on his cock and Nicky’s in his mouth. He barely comes at all this time, still wrung out from before, but he jerks in pleasure all the same. He’s been electrocuted before, and it was nothing like this, but he still feels the same, after, limp and unable to move and aching.

They gather him between them on the bed, and they all elect to ignore the mattress springs giving up the ghost beneath them.

-

“Hey,” someone’s saying at the door. “Hey. Guys!”

“Hnng?” Joe asks towards the sound.

“I’m glad you guys sorted out your shit and all, but we’ve got some other issues?” Nile asks impatiently.

Booker peeks up at her anxiously, from satiated and asleep to wracked with guilt in instants.

“Hey, Booker,” Nile says, smiling at him. “Good to see you. Please tell your boyfriends to get dressed.”

“Boyfriends,” Joe grumbles next to him. “Boyfriends—”

“Not now,” Nicky says. “Nile, would you mind, uh, turning around?”

Nile gives them all a supremely unimpressed look, but she does turn, for long enough that Nicky can press a firm kiss to first Booker’s lips and then Joe’s on his way to his clothes and then out of the room.

Joe groans, head thunking back against the pillow. “Do you think Nicky can deal with this alone?” He asks, as the sound of raised voices and steel on steel comes from the other room.

“I think this is a family problem,” Booker admits.

Joe’s kiss is lush and wet as he, too, rises from the bed. “Well, then,” he says. “You’d better get dressed, mein Schatz. Family murders wait for no man.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have no excuses.
> 
> The title is from Exile by Taylor Swift and Bon Iver (which is very much a Booker in exile song) and from Invisible String, also by Taylor Swift. I've been kind of just listening to folklore on repeat.
> 
> Meine lieben is German for "my dears", mein Schatz is literally "my treasure", mon choupinou is the funniest french pet name ever and it means "my little cabbage" (ETA, I wrote artichoke by mistake and a helpful person reminded me that not all vegetables are the same. I think my brain just went "artichoke would be even funnier")
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](https://bewires.tumblr.com/)


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